Their online application was three pages long. Even though I saw the above block on the first page I had a small hope it wasn’t a strict requirement because after I checked “no” to having Windows I was able to select that I used “Linux” from a drop down menu. Tutor.com then proceeded to waste another ten minutes of my time while I filled out the next two pages. Immediately after hitting the “submit” button I was informed that my application had failed.

I understand they have certain system requirements, but why they felt it was necessary to waste my time filling out the last two pages after I already marked that I did not use Windows is beyond me. What is also beyond me is why they choose to develop their browser based software for the Windows only Internet Explorer instead of any of the cross platform browsers that exist. Oh and did I mention that they opted to support iOS before they added support for non-Windows desktop operating systems?

Desktop

Chrome OS is also theoretically much more secure than standard laptops. Because Chromebooks are designed to be connected to the Internet, little data is stored on the machine itself. And because everything is focused on the browser — which Google updates frequently — there’s less chance of a malicious program running in the background.

Kernel Space

Torvalds announced back in May that the Linux 2.6.40 kernel will be rebadged as the Linux 3.0 kernel. The projected release date of Linux 3.0 was supposed to be today, but in a post on Google+, Torvalds explained that the discovery of a “subtle pathname lookup bug” has delayed the release.

Applications

Are you still taking screenshots? That is sooo last decade. Today if you want to showcase your application, your gaming skills, or even your astonishing new desktop wallpaper collection, you need a screen recorder (or screencasting tool) to capture full-motion video and audio of your desktop. You’ll find several solid options, but which one works best for you depends a lot on the type of content you need to capture, and what you intend to do with it.

For starters, the output produced by the tool varies considerably. Some alternatives give you a wide choice of video and audio codecs, others just one. But if that one (say, Flash) is the one you need, producing it directly is much quicker than having to save an intermediary file and crank it through a video editor. It also may be important to select just a portion of the screen rather than your whole display, or to choose a specific frame-rate (high for games, low for bandwidth-saving demos). Finally, there are always special features that vary between utilities, such as whether or not they can capture OpenGL content or be started remotely by script.

Games

There remains a scarcity of commercial games available for Linux with the big game companies rarely venturing into the Linux world. The main reason cited continues to be that its market share does not warrant high ticket-price games being ported over to Linux, let alone releasing an exclusive title. Also there is a perception that Linux gamers are more reluctant to put their hands in their pockets (not literally). However, the recent Humble Indie experiment, where gamers chose the price they wanted to pay, showed that this is far from the truth. The game bundles were available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. It was Linux gamers that were, in fact, prepared to pay (by donation) more for the same games than their Windows and OS X counterparts. How refreshing to put to bed that myth.

Why Chakra? Simple. Because Chakra seems to perform better in playing games. Thanks to Jeff for his benchmarks that made me do this choice! (http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-linux-distro-for-3d-performance.html). Are you ready? Let’s start with a beautiful game from Lionhead Studios… Black & White 2!

Desktop Environments

Compiz is no doubt the best compositing manager for Linux. It has been a part of Ubuntu for a long time and is actively maintained as well. Since the addition of the contentious Unity plugin, Compiz has become the most popular and reliable compositing manager easily surpassing GNOME 3′s Mutter.

Being a part of a big project like Ubuntu, developers are coming up with amazing new plugins like Modal dialogs. This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any useless plugins for Compiz. Here are 5 such plugins that find no practical applications whatsoever:

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

hree years ago, KDE was the innovative desktop, and GNOME the conservative one. Today, KDE is the conservative desktop, doing incremental releases, while GNOME is divided between GNOME 3 and Unity, each as innovative and as controversial as the other.

ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution, which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the Openbox Window Manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date. (Source: ArchBang front page)

I like fast, stable and up to date distros. But of course most of them say that.

New Releases

I am writing to announce the release of my Linux RAM disk kernel module. Yes, the Linux kernel has the brd module already integrated into it, and also the zram module it the staging tree. And yes, you can instead utilize ramfs or tmpfs for RAM based file systems. But RapidDisk or rxdsk is a bit different.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Two years ago, when I first entered this vast world that Linux is, I came to realize that there was a distribution that was mentioned over and over: PCLinuxOS. I became curious and followed some old posts in multiple threads. To be honest, being a total newbie, I felt sort of intimidated by the vocal followers of this distro and my aversion grew stronger when I visited the forum and was greeted by the rules. Boy, did I ever read something harsh!

[...]

From all of this, my biggest conclusion is that I, because of my lack of experience with Linux, acted unfairly. However, as Ezra Pound said of Walt Whitman, “I am old enough now to make friends”. Yes, PCLinuxOS… I owe you an apology.

Following the releases of PCLinuxOS 2011.6 and PCLinuxOS 2011.07 MiniMe KDE comes PCLinuxOS Phoenix XFCE Edition 2011-07 Final. As you can probably gather, it features the low-weight high-performance Xfce desktop which makes it perfect for machines a few years old. It also can be quite pretty and configurable.

Fedora

Due in major part to Ian Weller’s extensive work on expanding Fedora’s logo usage guidelines, we now have updated logo usage guidelines that cover the usage of the Fedora logo in more detail, including:

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

As expected, the second Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) event for 2011 has been officially announced a couple of minutes ago by Jono Bacon in an email. The Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit event will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA from 31st October to 4th November.

Canonical has announced that it will be changing its commercial certification programme in order to make it simpler for consumers to understand. The certification programme allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to apply for their systems to be validated and endorsed to work with the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Flavours and Variants

The idea to make a personal operating system, flashed in my head for quite some time, but for one reason or another I never managed to get to work seriously on such a project. In these days I decided to commit myself “full time” to it and I did it, also pushed by the wave of news that are coming in the world of the penguin! I did not, initially, planned to make UbuBox “SalentOS” public. Then, along the way, thanks to the advice of some friends and the realization that the system satisfy me, I said “Who knows … maybe this could satisfy someone else too. Why not make it public?”.

Plustek Inc., the leading manufacturer of the innovative Linux-based standalone Network Video Recorder (NVR), announces today a notable upgraded to its Centralized Management Software “MultiManager.” This version introduces powerful enhancements and new features to further improve monitoring effectiveness and efficiency. The new “Smart Cycling Control” tool brings added convenience to multiple-channel monitoring. Additionally, alert notification functionalities are improved to assist users in staying on top of alarms and to better respond to emergencies. User permissions also are better refined, providing more control and flexibility to the system. Last but not least, several other developments to image and video output file types, video recording performance, and user operations are made.

Android

Google has put Android 3.2 developer kits into the hands of app makers, which could help spur the creation of a new generation of Android tablet apps. Android 3.2 is optimized for a wider range of tablets, and it has a new compatibility display mode that gives users a new way to view fixed-sized apps on larger devices.

Looks like another round of roman candles are in order. After already setting off the celebratory fireworks for its previous user install milestone, CyanogenMod 7′s done it again — this time reaching past the half a million mark. The highly customizable Android homebrew is arguably the biggest aftermarket OS in the ROM-flashing campus, and it has the numbers to back it up.

The rivalry between Google and Apple continues to heat up as the two tech giants reported progressive development for Android and Apple App Store. Apple holds the lead with over 15 billion downloads while Android grew rapidly with over 4.5 billion. The increased number of Android smartphone and tablets flowing into the stores will attempt to even the playing field with Apple’s iOS devices.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has detailed the non-profit organisation’s plans for the engineering behind Firefox, as it looks to make the browser spread even more of its workload between multiple processes. Blizzard notes that, although the multiple process model for Firefox is not a panacea, “it does gives us a leg up on some of the more systemic problems”.

Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has published a blog entry that outlines the goals of Mozilla’s renewed effort to bring multiprocess browsing to the Firefox Web browser. The post highlights the key advantages that deeper process isolation will bring to Firefox and addresses some of the underlying requirements for Mozilla’s implementation.

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are. To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.

SaaS

OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

According to Oracle, it is not stepping away from the SPARC server line. MacDonald said that the company would not favour x86 over SPARC. “We will continue to treat x86 and Sparc equally, the same as Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux,” MacDonald said. “We are a two chip/operating system [company] and we will continue to foster those [offerings],” MacDonald said.

Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice’s competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation, says ComputerWorld.

Semi-Open Source

There are also several new functions, such as ‘dynamic templates’ – changes to a dynamic template are automatically incorporated into all mailshots which use that template. The new activities log provides administrators with a better overall picture by allowing them to trace all user actions. A detailed list of all new functions and of bug fixes can be found in the change log.

For example, the Android open-source project is open to anyone who wants to join. There are no admission processes or membership fees for Android — just the desire to join the project and contribute. By harnessing the capabilities of a larger community, open-source developers can deliver solutions that are often superior to proprietary ones.

Funding

Piston Cloud Computing, a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating.

Public Services/Government

On Friday, July 1, at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre – Brazil, the Brazilian Government’s Free Software Implementation Committee has signed, along with the communities of the LibreOffice and OpenOffice projects, maintained respectively by the The Document Foundation and Apache Foundation, a Letter of Intent which signals the mutual interest of cooperation with the FLOSS office suites.

Licensing

Licensing is an important component of every free software and open source project. This is especially true as an increasing number of corporations are adopting and distributing open source applications and code. This track considers various legal and licensing aspects of open source, both from a community and a corporate perspective.

Open Data

Programming

Google has added native support for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, to its Google Code project hosting site. Now, when developers create a new project, they can choose between Git, Mercurial and Subversion as their project’s version control system – support for Mercurial was added in April 2009. The long awaited change also applies to Eclipse Labs, a Google-hosted portal launched in May 2010 for open source projects based on the Eclipse platform.

Standards/Consortia

Five years after being adopted as an official ISO standard, the Open Document Format (ODF) still appears to have a long way to go, despite the support it has received from politicians and administrative agencies. Andreas Kawohl from the civic centre and IT processing department at Freiburg City Council told Friday’s session of the ODF Plugfest in Berlin: “ODF is a long way from being able to function as a standard format for exchanging documents”. According to Kawohl, 2000 administrative staff in Freiburg are now using both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, with 70,000 OpenOffice documents generated over a six month period, but hardly anyone outside of the organisation is able to use them.

Security

If you really know how Skype works, you know it’s about as safe as juggling firecrackers. Skype, the popular VoIP program, relies on every PC running Skype between you and who you’re calling to serve as stepping stones for your conversation. That’s bad. What’s worse is when Skype doesn’t check to see if Skype calls are actually sent, or received, by the right people.

Or, to quote Levent “Noptrix” Kayan, the security researcher that uncovered this hole, “Skype suffers from a persistent Cross-Site Scripting [XSS] vulnerability due to a lack of input validation and output sanitization of the ‘mobile phone’ profile entry. Other input fields may also be affected.”

Finance

Michael, I read the in the newspapers that the great recession, so-called, has long since ended, but unemployment remains stubbornly high with only a measly 18,000 jobs created in June. I believe the term that was coined some time ago is a jobless recovery. What is a jobless recovery?

We call that a depression – in this case, caused mainly by debt deflation. Just because the stock market is being inflated by the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that the economy itself is growing. It’s shrinking – from a combination of families and businesses having to pay off debts rather than spend their income on goods and services, and the government’s shift of taxes off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry.

Censorship

I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Two of the leading issues before the CRTC – over-the-top video and usage based billing – have come together as Shaw has announced plans to launch a new online movie service designed to compete with Netflix. Subscribers to the service, which will cost $12 per month, will be able to watch on their TV and computer. Most notably, Shaw says that the service will not count against subscriber data caps. Given the problems users of over-the-top video services have encountered with the caps, the Shaw approach places the spotlight on the CRTC net neutrality guidelines and undue preference rules. [Update: Shaw now says that watching movies via the Internet will count against user caps]

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

And what are these “offending works?” Well, looking at the DMCA notice (full notice embedded below), he appears to be claiming that both the header and the footer from his law firm’s legal correspondence, as well as the header of Magellan Capital Advisors LLC, are copyrights held by him. If you don’t recall, Magellan Capital Advisors was supposedly Pascazi’s “client,” in the attempt to trademark Bitcoin, and a letter sent from Magellan with the header in question was available on the USPTO website as Pascazi’s “evidence” for Magellan’s use of “Bitcoin” in commerce. You can see this part of the DMCA notice identifying “the works” here…

Copyrights

ACTA

The analysis is based on the December 2010 text, the “Final ACTA text following legal verification”. The later 2011 version does not contain substantial changes other than: “This Agreement shall remain open for signature by participants in its negotiation,17 and by any other WTO Members the participants may agree to by consensus, from 1 May 2011 until 1 May 2013.”

Summary: Commentary on journalists who trick people into reading articles that say the opposite of what their headlines say

THERE IS a new pattern of Linux FUD this week. Well, actually, it is not so new and we addressed it a couple of years ago. It’s to do with Microsoft’s proprietary-boosting patches for Linux, which Microsoft managed to sneak into Linux through Novell (which was paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Microsoft). Rather than delve into the FUD with some sources and links to the bait headlines from The H, a few others that followed, and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka SJVN (who admitted to me he was link-baiting), we will just link to the following older posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and advise against feeding those who bait (it typically goes something along the lines of, “Microsoft a top Linux contributor”).

What we prefer to deal with in Techrights is not PR spin but Microsoft’s patent attacks on Linux, especially in light of older Linux FUD that Jun Auza summarises in this timely new post which opens as follows:

rom the buggy-yet-popular Windows 95 to the god-knows-what-it-is and upcoming Windows 8, Microsoft has come a long way. Unlike the 90’s, they aren’t just making computer software, today they manufacture almost anything your tech-savvy mind can dream of. But after all these years, what hasn’t changed is the fact that Microsoft is still a company full of uptight nerds who think that attacking their competitors is what makes them no 1.

Microsoft’s long war against Linux, Android and all things related to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is something that can’t be ignored anymore.

It cannot be ignored, so Microsoft is actively attacking, along with Apple (more on that in imminent posts that are longer). Speaking of bait headlines, we sometimes write about articles whose headline says the opposite of the body of the article says. We gave numerous examples over the years and SJVN himself yields many new examples these days, especially when he writes for ZDNet (we truly hope he will stop doing this). Over at IDG there is also a new piece titled “Why enterprises will skip Windows 8″ (we have a wiki page about the vapourware). This is supposed to sound like bad news for Microsoft, but it starts with “Enterprise IT had a good business case for moving off the nearly decade old Windows XP operating system and onto the more modern Windows 7.”

A little promotional, no? We’ve seen that before. Here is how “Homer” addressed this in USENET several hours ago:

[quote]
Vista introduced moderate changes to the UI that forced a jarring adjustment upon some enterprise users.
[/quote]

“Moderate”?

My, my. The spin doctors are out in full force, aren’t they?

Vista was a freakish alien from another planet compared to XP. It looked totally different, it behaved totally different and it was largely incompatible with existing Windows software. /That/ was why it was universally slated and ignored by consumers, and why Vole central had to rush a new release out the door in a panic. About the only thing Vista had in common with XP was its bugs and malware. And Vista 7 is just a scam to hide the fact it’s just Vista with a new name.

“Moderate” my ass.

[quote]
Windows 8 will be far more challenging.
[/quote]

No shit Sherlock. It’s a bloody phone OS, for goat’s sake. I can justsee server admins trying to keep their servers going by shuffling tiles around on a touchscreen. Yeah, that’ll work.

[quote]
No doubt IT will be asking why enterprise desktops and laptops need touch right now.
[/quote]

ROTFLMFAO!

Is this guy on prozac, or what?

Yes, well… this is probably an example of articles we wrote about — those that try to attract Microsoft sceptics while in fact doing some pro-Microsoft whitewash. Thanks, IDG, but no thanks. █

Summary: A new PR offensive portrays an endorsement from SUSE as an elixir to Mono’s problems

WE ALREADY know that Mono is a patent risk. Nothing has changed since 2009 when Microsoft provided clarifications that only reinforced our scepticism. Well, it seems like SUSE, now a subsidiary of a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner, decided to show love for Mono again [1, 2]. “In addition to the intellectual property license, SUSE is also partnering with Xamarin to provide customer support,” says this article. Just as someone people started to hope (perhaps wishfully) that SUSE had cut ties with Microsoft deals, the sad realisation dawns upon Fred Williams, who writes, “so much for trying SUSE”

He clarifies in the body of his comment:

After Attachmate’s purchase of SUSE I was going to try it. But not if their going to push this Mono rubbish.
If Microsoft wants there language (C#, their version of Java) and .Net IDE to be available, let them license it so every one can use it. Why are intelligent developers chasing a moving target that contains portions of code that contain patent issues?

Rainer Weikusat responds by saying that this happens “[f]or the same reason Mono opponents are apparently incapable of understanding that the US patent systems is fubarred enough that ‘code without patent issues’ does not exist in ths USA: They are not really intelligent. That’s why they seek to imitate the not exactly glorious Microsoft designed technology to begin with.

“Also you are forgetting what Miguel de Icaza has systematically done to mono. [...] Basically wherever he can see profit [he] ends up closed.” –OiaohmThe operation is still funded by Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and it is a company which de Icaza admits is an "open core" (i.e. proprietary software) company. So what’s to celebrate here? Here is the press release from Nuremberg (also in Novell’s site, which is mostly inactive these days). “SUSE today announced it is partnering with Xamarin,” says the press release, “to bring products to market faster and to more effectively support customers using Mono®-based products. The agreement grants Xamarin a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Xamarin will also provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products, and assume stewardship of the Mono open source community project.”

They use the vague term intellectual property without saying if it’s copyrights or trademarks (or both). This does not actually cover the area of patents, which are mostly held by Microsoft, so how much of a reassurance is the above? Phoronixsays “Xamarin gains rights to the IP surrounding Mono.” What is “IP”? What is it then? Patents, copyrights, or trademarks? These are all very different. In our latest IRC log there is a longer discussion of these points. It was initially a Microsoft booster who brought to our attention the news right from the horse’s mouth, only to face dismissal from Oiaohm who wrote: “Xamarin does not get Novell license with MS by that. So Xamarin only has the bless[ing] of 1 party when it needs 2 [the Novell PR, by the way, does not change much]. Also you are forgetting what Miguel de Icaza has systematically done to mono. People forget the visual studio plugin started as open source. Migual de Icaza systematically convert that from GPL to MIT… Then from MIT to closed source. [...] MIT license allows you to change to closed source without approval. So as long as you are silver tongued enough to convince people that converting from gpl to mit will give more freedom you can pull it off. Monotouch also started open source as well. Basically wherever he can see profit [he] ends up closed.” █

After hearing of the HiE-D, Microsoft courted [Carlos] and requested a prototype. He gave Microsoft a prototype of the HiE-D, and according to [Carlos], it was taken to Redmond in February of 2007 – more than two years before the announcement of Project Natal. After meeting with Microsoft two more times that year, he was told by Microsoft that a patent on his invention wouldn’t be a bad idea.

While any action on Microsoft’s part would be speculation, we will say that the Kinect is remarkably similar to the HiE-D. Both use a ‘constellation’ of infrared dots projected on the user, and both can are able to detect the ‘skeleton’ of a user for motion control. The image below, from the HiE-D patent, shows how the movement of a face can be tracked.

Keep this in mind when Microsoft screams “innovation” in relation to Kinect (which we sometimes call “KINect” because of KIN). █

MICROSOFT LOVES to kill competition because it’s a lot easier than to actually create competing/compelling products. History has many examples like this and the Yahoo hijack is one of the more recent ones. In the case of Yahoo, Microsoft resorted to proxy fights and other questionable tactics which include AstroTurfing. Well, after a history of systematic crime Microsoft realises that it has a well-deserved reputation problem, so it hides behind brands of other companies and keeps re-badging its search, trying to somehow trick people into using Microsoft thinking that they are fighting “bad”, “evil” Google. As we experimented with some alternative search engines today (or meta-search) we came to discover the above in DuckDuckGo (from screenshot), taking the user to this FAQ page. Does DuckDuckGo really want to market itself as a substitute to Google by sporting Microsoft? Suffice to say, this is very disappointing.

“Do not let Microsoft pretend to be of both sides, both open source and proprietary, both Windows and Linux, both Microsoft and the “anti-Microsoft”.”In similar news of interest, amid a lot of Microsoft “open source” PR this week (e.g. trying to portray the company as open and as a contributor to a kernel it attacks with lawsuits, among other things) we discovered that Microsoft is top sponsor (i.e. passing money for placement) in an open source “Think Tank”, asbefore. The sponsorship is for Microsoft and friends to shape opinion and position of its competition. Do not let Microsoft pretend to be of both sides, both open source and proprietary, both Windows and Linux, both Microsoft and the “anti-Microsoft”. It’s a known technique for removing choice. Coca Cola uses similar tactics to ensure it gets paid even by those who hate Coke. █